SEO Expert Says Drop Shopify, Should I?

mhromney75 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:18:32 +0000

Hi Everyone,

I Just recently met with a couple friends of mine who are SEO experts about improving my site (they are not familiar with Shopify). After going through my site they saw a plethora of problems. A few of the problems they pointed out among others are:

No dedicated IP (they said this is really important in order to differentiate yourself with the crawler)

No Meta Tags – There is not an easy way to add these in Shopify for each product page. They said I don’t want generic tags for the whole site either.

When they viewed my source they said there was too much crap the crawler had to go through before it gets to anything meaningful. As a result the crawler will leave before it gets to what my site is about.

So the proposition they gave me is to leave Shopify and get my own hosting and build a new site. I was taken back by this a little, I thought they could come in and fix my existing site and I would live happily ever after.

So to my question. Are these really serious problems? If I stay with Shopify can I still get to the top of the rankings? Is there somebody out there that does SEO for Shopify?

Like many of you out there I am not a programmer or a designer just a guy who feels strongly about the products he sells and wants to share them with the world, so I have this site on the side while I work at a fulltime job and I am currently in graduate school. As a result I am pretty illiterate about these things and without the time to really delve into it, I need help.

Thanks
mhromney75
www.survivalmountain.com

Jared Burns commented

Jared Burns — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:33:59 +0000

I’m sorry, but their analysis obviously shows their lack of knowledge about how flexible Shopify is. Let me refute each of their comments…

True, there is no dedicated IP. Your site is still unique to search engines though by your domain name.
You CAN easily add unique META tags to every page of your site with a little Liquid logic. Anyhow, keywords are pretty much disregarded by most bots anyways.
LOL - what are they talking about? The source is just HTML. Shopify doesn’t inject anything funky into the source.

Be assured that your site is as SEO friendly as YOU make it and there is nothing that Shopify is doing to restrict you.

Here’s a tip. We just released http://www.synctobase.com that takes your Shopify inventory and injects it directly to Google Base. I don’t think you can get anymore SEO friendly than placing your products right into Google itself.

Good luck!

Rachel commented

Rachel — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:34:05 +0000

I think you need to drop your SEO experts!

For a start meta Tags are hardly used by search engines now, and certainly not by Google that has 80%+ of the search market. Meta description is more key but again not essential to ranking highly.

IP is only an issue if other users of that server have been blacklisted by the search engine. There are many more shared server sites than there are dedicated servers – many of them at the top of the search rankings.

We are number one on Google for our chosen search term, we are top 5 for our next 5 chosen search terms and we are top 10 for a further 10 key search terms – so Shopify can’t be that bad when it comes to SEO.

Did they mention page title, reverse links/quality of inbound links, link life span, keyword density and location etc etc etc.

There are loads of criteria and they change all the time.

Bottom line is – if you are not where you want to be in the search rankings it is more to do with the way you have developed your site rather than the inherent site architecture.

Paul D. Ouderkirk commented

Paul D. Ouderkirk — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:10:01 +0000

A quick scan of our web logs indicates that the Googlebot visited ~120,000 Shopify pages yesterday (April 16) alone.

mhromney75 commented

mhromney75 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:34:49 +0000

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your comments! So are there any companies that specialize in SEO for Shopify.

Thanks
mhromney75

Shannon M commented

Shannon M — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:37:42 +0000

This is an interesting thread. Given that we’ve had a few questions about SEO and Shopify recently, I’m thinking this might make a good blog post for the Shopify blog – “How To Optimize your Shopify store”

I’m certainly not an SEO expert, but if any of you are, especially when it comes to Shopify, I’d love to get your input for the post. Anyone?

meashman commented

meashman — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:16:16 +0000

I’d be interested in a post detailing better SEO practices for Shopify stores. How do we change keywords and descriptions for individual pages for instance?

Jared Burns commented

Jared Burns — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:21:22 +0000

Hey Ryan. You can use a blog and create an article to represent each page through your site. Then use and if statement in theme.liquid to pull in each article depending on the current page. With this method you can put the keywords in each article rather than jamming everything in the the theme template (though you could do that too).

Either way keywords aren’t really that important to SEO anyways. Thoughtful keywords in your page content and titles is more effective.

jonathanbriggs commented

jonathanbriggs — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:24:25 +0000

It is an interesting thread and I am with the group that suggests you have been given bad advice.

Shopify as Jared has pointed out is extremely flexible but you will need to optimise your Liquid templates to really get the benefits. Here are my current guidelines:

1. Do change the page titles to make them all unique – Google likes page titles that reflect page content
2. Make sure that you use the power of “handles” so that your URLs contain your product names or sensible category/post titles
3. Use the description META tags and make them unique per page (perhaps use the first part of your product description – that should give you some good relevant keywords. Google does use this META tag sometimes.
4. Make sure that your pages contain links to other pages and that these links contain your keywords (product titles for example). Google rates pages that have inbound links according to their link text (even we believe for internal links)
5. Write good copy; good interesting content about your products and services and make it natural rather than stuffing it with keywords
6. Use XML sitemaps and things like Synctobase to get your content out there to the spiders
7. Run a separate blog describing the behind the scenes stories on your site and linking through to relevant content. I am reliably told that blogger is a good starting point.
8. Be patient. It can take months (seriously) for a new domain to start to have any proper traction in the results
9. Start to build reputation through good quality directories, forums and social media. It’s hard work but will pay off over time.
10. Try and create something remarkable on your site that people will tell their friends about and will generate some links.

I am extremely impressed by the flexibility of the Shopify system and discover new things about it every week. I have not implemented all of these changes myself yet as it all takes time and energy (and MarketQuarter is not my full time job) but over the next few weeks and months all of these will be applied to my site.

I think a forum on SEO would be great.

One last thing – don’t do bad stuff (such as keyword stuffing or cloaking) even if others tell you you should. You risk getting banned from the index and what’s worse, this could even have a knock-on effect on the rest of us.

Jonathan

meashman commented

meashman — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 19:08:35 +0000

Thanks for the tips guys! I’ll have to see about implementing some of them.

DamienBuckley commented

DamienBuckley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:18:42 +0000

I love ‘SEO Experts’ – they generally have no clue whatsoever. I went to a presentation at my local chamber of commerce a couple years back to hear this guy waffle on about SEO - talking complete tosh – even claiming to be a ‘good friend of Tim Berners Lee’ – seriously. And I hang out with John Travolta too. Problem was, he had the room hanging off his every word – non-tech people dont know any better and get ripped off by these clowns.

I’m with Rachel – ditch the SEO guys and get a decent designer. Any competent standards-aware designer should be able to build you a good, search friendly site on Shopify and not charge you any extra for ‘SEO’. The truth is, if your site is done right, it will already be Search Engine Optimised. If you want to know more from those who do know – go get a copy of ‘Designing with Web Standards’ by Jeffrey Zeldman – it’ll be the cheapest web education you’ll ever get and you’ll hear from one of the most respected guys in the industry how things should be done – then you can probably go teach your expert buddies a thing or two.

Far as I can see your site isn’t bad – there are a few html errors which are preventing it from validating XHTML Strict but any reasonably competent designer should be able to fix this up for you.

As per the ‘crap’ the crawlers have to go through – I’m not seeing much – certainly about a quarter of the tables and other nonsense you’ll typically find in just about all other e-commerce platforms – again its down to your designer and / or the template you’re using. Shopify’s greatest power is that it instills very few template-based rules on designers – unlike most’ all other cart software

Excellent bullet-point advice from Jonathan there – good write up mate.

Another things no-ones mentioned here that I believe is a massive ‘free’ aid to SEO included with Shopify is the marketplace.

As per the recommendation to ditch Shopify and go build another site – did they have a quote to go with that advice? Thats usually what follows.

Matthew Capewell commented

Matthew Capewell — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:12:13 +0000

Since our launch in September last year we have tried to follow all of the items that Jonathan has listed above. The result: Google ‘pink girls gifts’ and we appear number 1 (and number 2 for that matter).

So in my experience, Shopify is very “SEO friendly”. The key is you have to design your theme and templates properly to make your site spiderable and include the necessary meta tags etc.

Matthew

tobi commented

tobi — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:33:05 +0000

Great discussion guys! Shopify was designed to be as SEO friendly as possible.

You will notice that all default themes for example automatically list the product name in the title, in the url and in either a h1 or h2 tag. When Shopify was released SEO Experts still charged thousands of dollars to even tell you that these things are important.

Another example of this was that Shopify automatically generates a sitemap.xml for every store since the standard existed.

We do a lot of SEO on shopify.com to promote our own product and we feed those things we learn back into the community and software.

I think that Shopify out of the box leaves you with a better SEO than most SEO Experts would leave you with after having a go at an oscommerce installation. That being said, we want to learn more! Keep the tips and tricks coming!

Mascot96 commented

Mascot96 — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:26:51 +0000

This is a great discussion. So has anyone found somebody who does SEO professionally for Shopify?

jonathanbriggs commented

jonathanbriggs — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:05:55 +0000

Tom Smith at www.everythingability.com is a seasoned professional here in the UK (used to work for me) and is now helping a number of Shopify sites get the most out of their sites (traffic, usability, increasing sales etc).

Jonathan

Tom Smith commented

Tom Smith — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:13:35 +0000

Thanks for the plug Jonathan!

I have worked with lots of smaller ecommerce clients to help them improve traffic and sales. The tool doesn’t really matter at all, but personally I recommend Shopify because I really like it.

SEO has always been something of a dirty word for me because it sells the idea that with some mystic technical twiddling you can be top of Google by lunchtime. Lots of people want to believe this because it sounds good doesn’t it? But I do lots of SEO.

For me SEO is very simple and it’s NOT about title tag, keyword density, h1 tags (though it’s always a good idea to get these sorted, it’s all well documented online, just don’t believe the hype).

SEO is about…

Is Your Product Any Good? Being top of Google with a product nobody wants, or for search terms nobody will search for is a waste of time.

Is Your Product or Brand Remarkable? What would make a customer bother to mention you to a friend or colleague?

Is Your Strategy Research-based? Every industry is different. The idea that an SEO expert can know about bikinis, gardening, hi-fis and coffee is crazy. YOU know your customers better than any SEO company ever could. The best way to learn what works SEO-wise for your industry is lots and lots of trial and error. Don’t believe what you are told, develop theories and test them. Does green sell more than blue. If I use bold tags on important words do my visits go up? Doing research is easy and more valuable and honest than any SEO “expert”.

Are You Ready For Some Hard Work? I know it would be nice if you could hand off promoting your business online to an SEO company but in truth, many will take your money, increase your traffic but your sales will remain static. If you are increasing traffic but not working equally as hard on your conversion rates (using persuasive techniques and design) then you are inviting the world to your party and forgetting to turning on the music and offer nibbles.

The best thing anyone could do when thinking about improving their SEO is to forget about SEO. Yes, you want all the obvious optimisations but they are actually quite easy to implement. At the same time as improving your SEO you want to seriously be looking at your brand, the subliminal messages your design offers. What anxieties you haven’t calmed. What questions you haven’t answered. How your products have a single jot of remarkability.

Until you address all the above SEO isn’t going to help you in the way you hope that it would.

When I said it was simple, I meant it’s simple but also a bit messy… like humans I guess :-)

tom

Sloan commented

Sloan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:35:38 +0000

Yours truly is a professional SEO and was asked recently to work on a couple of Shopify sites. First things first, I like shopify as a basic inventory and e-commerce tool. To build your own site and bolt on a shopping cart is expensive and often painful. So right there, shopify rocks as a way to get product online.

I agree with Tom Smith that people do think of SEO as witchcraft, but at the same time there is science to our art. I am not here to wage any wars or tell anyone they’re crazy (except the poor guys that was told by experts to ditch shopify). We have value and we’re not crazy, you just need to be careful who you work with.

1 – Shopify does a nice job in many basic areas of SEO.
2 – There are workarounds in several other areas of basic SEO.
3 – Nothing is going to replace good design.
4 – Nothing is going to replace your knowledge of your products and the space.

The trick is marrying these things with good keywords and a strategy for attracting inbound links. A blog, as was mentioned, is a decent idea. Commenting on forums and blogs while not what is used to be is still a way for people to see you. Another thing y’all should look at is SpyFu.com – put in your top competitors and see what other words they rank for. Use a free keyword tool like https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to see how popular the terms are. From there decide if they belong in your strategy (think site and inbound links)

Also, look at other shopping engines beyond Google. You might use SingleFeed to do the dirty work (Hey Shopify folks, it might be cool to talk to SingleFeed about an integration – they are a google partner)

That’s all I got
-Steve
Have fun and happy selling…

Tino commented

Tino — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:46:43 +0000

I have to agree with Rachel:

You must drop your ‘SEO specialists’!

I’m a SEO programmer at one of the top UK internet marketing agencies and have been doing SEO for well over 6 years.
So I know what works (and what doesn’t)!

I have to say that Shopify is one of the most SEO friendly carts out there.
It was for that reason (and because it’s so flexible) that I have chosen to use it for my personal shop.

I’m not going into much detail about the suggestions from the ‘experts’ as it has been addressed before. But anyone with minimal coding experience can tweak the shopify themes to have different meta tags for every page or section of the web site.

And most importantly the <title> can also be customised.

Most hosting packages offer shared IP addresses unless you pay to have a dedicated one. Further, having shared IP addresses doesn’t hurt your website (unless you’re sharing IP’s with several adult, gambling, pharmacy websites).

The code produced by shopify is pure clean HTML.

Shopify doesn’t produce duplicate pages or duplicate urls as many other carts do.

Ultimately, my online shop is not working at full power yet. I have just launched early so that the domain gets established and pagerank first.

Even so, without much offline marketing or link building the home page is already a PR4. :-) (mainly from on-page optimisation). The site architecture seems to work well too because there many subpages with PR3 and PR2 which indicates that the PageRank is being distributed throughout the site very well.

I think that speaks for itself.

Once again mate: You must drop your ‘SEO specialists’ not your shopping cart! :-)

Starlooks Boutique commented

Starlooks Boutique — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:23:33 +0000

I need help marketing our site. It’s not going anywhere.

myalingerie commented

myalingerie — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:18:27 +0000

@Starlooks

We really like your site very much. As a matter of fact, we are talking with Ryan to re-design ours, after we came across your site.

We just started ours, 2 weeks ago but we have not done any sales yet. We are doing google adwords and linking from other sites and we get about 50 visits a day.

What type of marketing have you done?

PS: My boyfriend and I love your clothes.

Ale.

itsRyan commented

itsRyan — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:43:02 +0000

@Starlooks – take a look at this http://adwords.google.com, have you given this a go?

Also, take a look at Basesync http://www.synctobase.com/ – it adds your product feed to Google Base http://base.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=2904

Starlooks Boutique commented

Starlooks Boutique — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:16:15 +0000

I have tried these sites:

topbabyboutiques.com
modmommashoppes.com
2008ultrahipboutiques.com
babble.com

and a bunch of others. I’ve tried blogads.com…

The best site is the coolmompicks.com. But I need to get like 1,000 visitors per day. I need LOTS of traffic. LOTS, LOTS, LOTS….

Starlooks Boutique commented

Starlooks Boutique — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:19:02 +0000

And they need to be qualified, if you know what I mean. I need to TARGET my audience. Coolmompicks.com brought in over 650 unique visitors in one day, which is the kind of traffice we need to make at least 1 sale per day.

To myalingerie: ty! if you like the clothes so much why not make a purchase ;-) use newstarlooks for a 10 percent discount on a 50 or more purchase :-)

myalingerie commented

myalingerie — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:03:17 +0000

@Starlooks
So it seems that you have not done Adwords. That could help you. You will definitly reach a broader audience.

We will. We don’t have kids yet.

Ale

DogTooth commented

DogTooth — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:22:52 +0000

I’d just like to say that I’ve found Shopify to be great in terms of flexibility and rankings etc. With the help of someone previously mentioned above I found Shopify and I’ve never looked back. My site is number one on Google, Yahoo and MSN in the UK for my main keyword of ‘Wall Stickers” and it’s close to the top on the global versions. The same goes for my other keywords too, and to add insult to injury of my fellow wall sticker competitors I did this in less than six months, coming from no-where.

I think its a combination of Shopify, Good advice and a bit of hard work.

P.S. Sounds like an ad for Tom, www.everythingability.com, but with his help and a mutual friend they’ve help me build a site that gets around 20,000 unique hits a month….which is not to be sniffed at.

I also need to shout out a fellow shopify designer in HunkyBill who has helped alot with a cool JavaScript interface.

My site is www.wallglamour.co.uk

dandlboutiqe commented

dandlboutiqe — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:57:45 +0000

I did meet with a marketing rep at Corner Your Market as I also have a real store here in Reno, but she said some things I do NOT know how to do in Shopify. She said to make sure my Anchors on each page are relevant ???? Is that page titles? I was confused. She also told me about back links, I have a links page and affiliate program, but she also told me to add a sitemap to the site? I am working on that now… but what else can I do. I hate ADWORDS… in my opinion they take my $ and I never get sales… how can I boost sales and traffic? I write articles on my blog and link back to the site with keywords, etc. but what else…

Chelsea commented

Chelsea — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:17:35 +0000

dandleboutique, you already have a sitemap. The url can be found in the marketing tab of your shopify admin. You can submit the sitemap URL directly to Google and Yahoo.

meashman commented

meashman — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:19:53 +0000

I think the marketing professional was probably referring to an actual sitemap page, that is a page on your site with outbound links to all the other pages on your site. This apparently is beneficial as far as SEO goes.

Chelsea commented

Chelsea — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:39:23 +0000

ah yes meashman… I didn’t consider that. Can the existing XML page be used to create that dynamically I wonder?

meashman commented

meashman — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:25:42 +0000

That’s a good question, because it would save a lot of work. I’m curious as well…anyone know about this?

Chelsea commented

Chelsea — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:23:15 +0000

Found this – looks like it’s time for me to learn XML and Javascript. ;-)

I think this could be relatively easily adapted to what we want to do though. Any more technical people with ideas on how to adapt this easily? I will see if I can figure it out, and I will post it if I do. If anyone figures it out in advance, please post the code.

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_to_html.asp

dandlboutiqe commented

dandlboutiqe — Sat, 17 May 2008 20:40:29 +0000

Okay.. now what the heck does she mean by “anchor” title are relevant to each product. For example… when you look up the url for each designer in our store it says:

http://shop.dragonfliesandladybugs.com/collections/catimini

Whereas other stores that are higher up in rank say:

Catimini-Oliebollen….

I think she was wanting me to have a title for each page? Although I have titles on each page, does it really matter for SEO purposes. When I was using Zen Cart before this.. you could put in your Meta Tags, Description and Keywords on the back end of each product… does shopify automatically generate that for you?

HELP…

Chelsea commented

Chelsea — Sun, 18 May 2008 01:57:52 +0000

titles that are human readable are important; you can rename your pages… but be aware that old links will not continue to work then.

lorem ipsum commented

lorem ipsum — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:00:46 +0000

@dandl

From what little SEO I know, page titles are crucial. Just try a handful of Googles and see how often the top results have your search terms or phrase in the title (top line of the results that forms the link). There are threads on here detailing how to quickly construct fairly SEO-friendly page titles automatically (search ‘title’)

Not sure how anchor titles have on SEO (though they are good accessibility practice) but they are the title attribute of your web links. Typically:

<a href="/collections/widgets" title="Browse our range of Widgets">Widgets</a>

If you construct the links in your linklists long-hand (by contructing the ‘a’ tag) you can add in a title with liquid variables.

<ul id="collections">
{% for link in linklists.yourCollectionLinklist.links %}
       <li><a href="link.url" title="Browse our {{link.title}} Range">{{ link.title }}</a></li>
       {% endfor %}
</ul>

ikram commented

ikram — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:14:37 +0000

Hi guys, Am wondering, is it anywhere possible to edit my page title so that it can do

“Product Collection, Product Title, Manufacturer, Shop Name and Location”

Right now its just Shop Name and Product Title.

http://www.recreationwarehousellc.com/products/value-bottom-mount-lift

appreciate the help. I’m getting cross eyed understanding liquid haha.

SEO San Diego commented

SEO San Diego — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:08:35 +0000

Change the theme.liquid head title to read something like:


<title>{{collection.title}},{{page_title}},{{product_location}},{{shop.name}}</title>

David L commented

David L — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:45:10 +0000

One question about the 10 tips… you say to create a separate blog. Why is that? Is it better for the blog to be completely separate (as opposed to integrated) and living at a different URL?

I have a client who wants a shopify site and a blog. The Shopify blog is pretty basic… no archives or commenting… but I figured I would just not worry about the archiving (they can just delete stuff when the page gets really long) and add commenting via a third party service. But would it be better to have two sites? Say… the Shopify site and a WordPress blog… completely separate?